social media strategy

Social media is so powerful. You probably know that it’s important to have a social media strategy, but the big question is always, “How do I do that”?.

Today I have a guest post on ways you can develop a winning social media strategy for your real estate business. Sabine has a great list of tools in her article, but I would like to add two more. One is MeetEdgar and the other is the one I'm currently using which is SmarterQue.

 

Where Do You Start?

In social media platforms, people gather to talk and share information about various things, from entertainment, business, and politics to sports, lifestyle issues, technology, and so on.

For real estate investors, social media presents, a perfect opportunity to reach out and engage with prospects.

Many who know about this, however, make the mistake of simply posting stuff on the most popular platforms-Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and so on, hoping there will be some kind of a massive positive reaction from the audience.

In the end, there’s usually little to no reaction from the audience because you either lacked or had a poor social media strategy. But you can do better than that. I’m going to share with you a proven social media strategy that will get more of your prospects engaging with your content so you’re able to produce more leads.

 

Determine and Define Your Audience

social media strategy

Not defining and knowing who your target audience is and continuing to post on social media haphazardly, is exactly like casting a net in a huge ocean without having an idea where the type of catch you want is located.

Even if you succeed to get to the right audience, your catch will probably be very little because your marketing pieces may not be the right content that they need to see to move to the next stage of buying; not to mention that you will have spent considerable time, effort, and resources for very little return.

Knowing who your audience is, on the other hand, implies that you will have the chance to come up with more targeted marketing decisions and that you will be placing your cast net in a part of the ocean where there’s plenty of fish (the fish that you like) to catch.

The process will consist of:

  1. Creating demographic customer profiles which consist of aspects such as race, age, profession, gender, income, and education level, marital status, family size, and religion.
  1. Coming up with a demographic profile for your business type. This will involve things such as the type of industry, location, type of product, number of employees, annual revenue and customer size.
  1. Creating the buyer persona. Here, you will have to determine the needs, desires, goals, preferences, values of your customers as well as the challenges they face.

Knowing such information will assist you to understand and predict what a client needs and how your product or service can address those needs.

Defining a target market is a prerequisite for your social media strategy. Although social media can be fun and the mistake can be made to just post at will, being a business owner requires that you spend time knowing your market.

Choose Appropriate Social Networks

In deciding which social channel will serve your real estate business better, there are a few things you will want to consider:

1. Your Business’s Goals

It’s almost impossible to pick the right social platform for any business if you haven’t yet established what your goals or objectives are. In fact, if you are unable to explain how a specific social media platform will assist you to achieve certain goals, it’s best to stay away from that platform or follow popular influencers' on that platform for a couple of weeks to note what they are doing well & what you’d like to do differently to reach your target market.

If your goal is to create brand awareness for your real estate business, opt for platforms that have a huge following and advertising options that include things such as paid promotions. Facebook is a great example.

If your goal is to generate lead, LinkedIn holds so much potential particularly for a real estate business.

2. Audience and Competition

Make an effort to find out what channel(s) your competitors are using. This will help you set yourself apart when it comes to the kind of approaches you intend to use.

Also, determine which channels the majority of those you are targeting are using. In the case of real estate, expect to find most of them on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

3. Type of Content

Lastly, the type of content you intend to share should also guide you in selecting a channel properly suited for it. For instance, if it’s videos, consider choosing platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat or YouTube. If its industry news and updates, LinkedIn or SlideShare will serve you better.

 

Set Up A Communication Strategy

A content plan is what will ensure that you are serving the right information to the right audiencesocial media strategy and at the right time. This will involve a couple of things, namely:

1. Publishing Frequency

To begin with, establish a publishing frequency. This could range from the number of times you intend to post in a day, week and month. Remember, consistency is what will help the audience know when to expect fresh content from you and in the long run, this will help develop a connection to them and also raise engagement levels.

2. Determine Who To Involve

When it comes to publishing content, you will have to decide whether you will involve content from other blogs and sources. You can make a larger percentage of the content yours and leave a small portion to come from other sources.

A lot of business owners are reluctant to share others content, but this is a HUGE mistake. By sharing other people’s relevant content on your platform, it’s similar to introducing someone at a networking event. You are seen as incredibly valuable because you can connect your prospect to something that will move them forward. Guaranteed they will be back for more of your recommendations and to do business with you.

Also, determine who is going to post the content to the different platforms and if possible, set up guidelines that will be followed in each case.

Tools for Organizing and Implementing a Social Media Strategy

Performing a majority of the tasks we’ve mentioned can be pretty time consuming and inconvenient. Thankfully, there are a number of tools you can use to manage your social media platforms. Here’s a few tools that every real estate investor who is posting on social media needs to help with a targeted social media campaign:

  • Hootsuite
  • Buffer
  • SproutSocial
  • IFTTT
  • Social Mention
  • Google Spreadsheets & Calendar

Avoid going full force ahead with these tools, you’ll want to be sure you have a good understanding of their benefits and limitations before proceeding.

Lastly, to ensure that all the effort you are putting into this social media strategy is leaving an impact, be sure to look out for the different metrics that tell how your posts, videos, and other campaigns are fairing.

Examples include engagement numbers, view count (in the case of videos), impressions, page likes and follows, and so on.

Such metrics will also assist you to adjust parts of your social media strategy that don’t seem to be performing well. Every major social media platform has an analytics section, where you can easily pull this information.

 

Conclusion

When you have a proper social media strategy, your chance to improve your real estate’s social ranking, build your brand, increase web traffic, and enjoy better conversion rates will become high.

What we’ve just looked at is a roadmap that will certainly get you there. The ball is in your court now.  Social media is something that should definitely be implemented in your marketing strategy but it’s important that you define who your target market is, select an appropriate social network, set up a communication strategy, and choose proper tools to help with your targeted social media campaign.

This will ensure that you get the most bang for your buck & your time while reaching the types of prospects you want.

 

Author the Author

Sabine Ghali Profile Image 1 Sabine Ghali is the Director at Buttonwood Property Management, a property management company in Toronto. She is an entrepreneur at heart who endeavors to help investors create real estate wealth over time in the Greater Toronto Area. Sabine is published in a number of media outlets, including Toronto Sun and Gulf News, among many other

 

If you would like to schedule a 1 on 1 call with me to talk about specific strategies for building your brand and creating more effective marketing for your business, you do that here by clicking this link.

 

Have you gotten your freebies here on the blog?  If not be sure to do that today so you don’t miss any of the business building tips I have coming your way. I want this year to be your best year ever!  And if you enjoyed this article, please share it.

 

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